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British author Alan Bytheway recently published a book on the 1890 Blenheim Swamp murder

A new book, published by British author Alan Bytheway, details the 1890 Blenheim Swamp murder that captivated Oxford County and brought a number of international media outlets to cover the case in Woodstock.

It was enough to entice a British teacher and author, Alan Bytheway, when he came across the case in his reading.

“Having read just a few pages of this particular article in the World’s Greatest Detective Stories, just a brief story…I found it scarcely believable,” he said in a phone interview on Wednesday.

It’s the 125th anniversary of the Oxford's own "Blenheim Swamp Murder," and now there’s a new way for local residents to read up on the case.

Bytheway’s book, called Murder as a Fine Art: A True Story of Fraud, Betrayal and Murder Across Two Continents, was recently published and released as an eBook on Amazon at the end of last month.

The story centres around Reginald Birchall, the man who convinced two Englishmen, Frederick Benwell and Douglas Pelly, to sail to Canada and invest with him in a Niagara-area farm.

But there was no farm.

Birchall used the same scheme that had cheated him, on his two new victims.

“He had come over to Canada because he himself had fallen to a plot to get him to give money for a farmstead, only to find that he was directed to a hovel,” Bytheway said of Birchall.

“He turned around and tried to do what he himself had been subject to, two years earlier.”

Instead of finding a new home and business on this mythical plot of land in February 1890, Benwell was murdered and dumped into the Blenheim Swamp.

“I found it extraordinary that a man in (Birchall’s) position, the son of a very well-respected and well-known clergyman, could finish up shooting a fellow public schoolboy in the back of the head, in an attempt for financial gain,” Bytheway said.

His book describes how the two Elvidge brothers found Benwell’s body, partially frozen into the swamp, a few days later.

“Clearly evident, was an attempt to conceal the body’s identity. Every name-tag and outfitter’s name had been cut out from his clothing,” Bytheway wrote in his book.

But an important clue was found the next morning.

“Dragging his axe through the ice encrusted ground, George Elvidge came across a half-opened cigar case lying about six feet from where the body had lain,” Bytheway wrote.

That case included a handwritten label, F.C. Benwell.

This was one of the facts of the case that was published and learned by curious townsfolk well in advance of Birchall’s trial. Bytheway described the trial as “seriously flawed.”

“He was seen as man who had committed the murder, even before the trial had even taken place,” he said.

That trial, which took place in Woodstock, ignited the town in a sort of media frenzy as international publications came to cover the case.

By the end, Birchall was convicted of Benwell’s murder and publicly hanged for his crime in November 1890 outside the Woodstock jail.

This new book was Bytheway’s way to determine whether a “miscarriage of justice” had indeed taken place, as was argued by some in the years after the trial.

“But I think that I establish, to my complete satisfaction, that he was guilty as charged,” Bytheway said.

The book was a labour of love for the 83-year-old writer.

He conducted most of the research between 1999 and 2001, beginning in England in the birthplaces of Birchall and Benwall – even speaking with distant relatives – and later visiting Canada and working with several Woodstock and Princeton residents.

A few years ago he decided it was time to look at the case all over again, and finally write the book that could be published for a mass audience.

His book features letters and other evidence that, to his knowledge, hasn’t been seen or used in any of the other reports of the Blenheim Swamp murder, including a key finding at the Woodstock Museum, Bytheway explained.

They include a letter sent by Benwall to his family, written during his trip across the Atlantic, and a note written by the victim’s father to a police chief in Niagara Falls.

“You can realize it was quite a considerable undertaking, at my age, to start again and try to put it into a good, readable form,” Bytheway said of the journey.